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The co-founder of BlueGold Capital Management, the commodities hedge fund manager whose fund shut down last year after losing a third of its value in 2011, is preparing to launch a hedge fund that will focus on trading oil derivatives.

Pierre Andurand has set up Andurand Capital Management and told Financial News that the new firm is already running a managed account and will launch a fund in February. He said: “Our main fundraising focus will be former BlueGold investors. There will be the old high-water mark for the ones who stayed with us until the end.”

Andurand set up BlueGold with Dennis Crema, the former head of trading at Geneva-based Vitol. It started trading in February 2008 and ran a sole energy fund, which returned 209% that year, 55% in 2009 and 13% in 2010. BlueGold managed about $2.2bn at its peak.

In April last year, BlueGold said it was liquidating its energy fund because its founders wanted to part company. The strategy lost 34% in 2011 and assets had shrunk to $1bn.

Andurand has assembled a 14-strong team at his new venture, which he said is different to BlueGold in several ways. He said he is the only portfolio manager, there will be no equities book, and it will run lower leverage and smaller positions over a shorter time horizon.

Andurand said: “In the current environment, we don’t see trades that we can put on for two years. Trades will typically be held for two to three months”.

He added that the main opportunity initially will be in relative value trades, such as WTI versus Brent oil, rather than taking big directional bets.

Andurand began his career as an oil trader at Goldman Sachs’s J Aron & Co unit in Singapore, before working at Bank of America and then Vitol. After BlueGold shut down, he spent last year setting up a kick-boxing league called Glory World Series.

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*This story now contains an amended quote from Pierre Andurand. In an earlier vision a quote read that there would be "no high-water mark for the ones who stayed with us until the end”. This has been changed to reflect that the "old" high-water mark will apply to these investors.